DATELINE: ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA - 05.08.2014
Apologies for the delay in posting. As mentioned, I've been on a train without WiFi for the past two days...Now.
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| Kalgoorlie, Australia |
“What time Kalgoorlie?” The old man is at it again. “What time Kalgoorlie?”
And I again resist the urge to divide by 284.
The old man sits across the aisle from me on the Indian Pacific train coming into Adelaide from Perth. He’s not crazy or mentally challenged, as he’s traveling without a caretaker, unlike the guy on the train to Melbourne who kept going to the restroom every half-hour but never locking the door, giving several people during the day an unpleasant surprise when they opened the door themselves. This guy is just a cranky-pants. Half-elf-like, with a big, crooked nose, wearing a blue windbreaker and tweed pants, with white hair in a style that’s one half combover, one half finger in the socket, this old man is practically a secondary character on “The Simpsons”, and every five minutes he’s up wandering the aisle, asking in an accent that’s one half demented old man, one half eighth-generation Australian mixed with Greek, “What time Kalgoorlie? What time Kalgoorlie?”
My earbuds do nothing to help me. I try Gomez, the Foo Fighters, and the usually fail-safe Beastie Boys, but none of the bands completely drown out his incessant inquiry.
“What time Kalgoorlie?”
His question seems even more committed after he’s heard the conductor announce on the public address system, uh, the estimated time of arrival in Kalgoorlie (10:30pm).***
It’s enough to make me hesitate to take out my computer, as the man seems to think my possession of a laptop indicates that I somehow control the schedule of the Indian Pacific from my seat 5 in the Red Carriage. It does not. Each time he asks me (and he asks me every single time), all I say is, “I don’t know, sir,” as politely as I can.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if not for two facts:
1. There’s absolutely zero to do in Kalgoorlie at 10:30pm. I would argue, based on my ten-minute walk through the town a week ago and a conductor’s warning, “Do not get off the beaten path, here, my friend,” there’s nothing to do at one in the afternoon, either, except perhaps get mugged for your daypack. What this half-elf has planned for after midnight in some mining town smack-dab in the boondocks of Western Australia is anyone’s guess.
2. The same half-elf hadn’t been asking the exact same question every five minutes on the train coming out to Perth a week ago.
Yeah, same guy. Same question for the same amount of time the train was moving - over thirty-six hours. And each time he asked me last week, I took a deep breath, muttered, “I don’t know, sir,” and I divided a number into 284.
284 is the number of days I’m expecting this trip to take. July 7th, 2014 through April 17th, 2014 is 284 days. So during moments on this trip when I’m having a rough time, I’ve been taking the number of days already gone and dividing it by 284.
As I type this the quotient is .09507042 (27/284). That means I’m 9.5% done with this trip.
You may find the fact that I do this math depressing. You might think that it defeats any effort to live in the moment and enjoy myself if I’m constantly calculating and re-calculating how much of the journey is completed and, by extension, how much further I have to go.
I disagree. Rather than the quotient seeming like a long ways to go, instead it represents progress. I keep thinking of this journey as somewhat of a creative endeavor, a project, similar to when I wrote The Vanilla Gigolo Prescription. I take comfort in the fact that, like any creative journey, it will become something different than what I set out for it to be. Also, continuing the metaphor, it challenges me to take a large undertaking one step at a time. If I look at the mountaintop from the valley, I’m not sure I could convince myself I could climb that mountain. If I kept thinking about writing the actual entire 450 pages it takes to complete a novel, I don’t know if I would have been able to complete The Vanilla Gigolo Prescription. But by thinking about it in terms of writing one or two pages a day, the task becomes not only doable, but manageable.
(Have you not read
The Vanilla Gigolo Prescription? My goodness, you can buy it cheap
here.)
This trip is similar. Looking at it as almost ten months makes it seem impossible, makes me want to crawl into the fetal position and sleep (this does not work on a train seat, by the way). But by breaking the trip down into pieces, looking at each piece as a lily pad I can step on as I traverse the river (yeah, I’m a frog in this new metaphor) makes it reasonable, doable, and even manageable.
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| Perth Zoo |
So I stopped thinking of July as spending a month in Australia. Instead, I started thinking of, “Next week is a week in Perth; that’s easy…Today and tomorrow I’m on the train; I can do that…And in a week, I’m in Bali.”
Now, I can do a week to make it to Bali, no problem.
Rather than make it tedious, it’s liberating me to focus on what’s right in front of me, as a percentage of the whole journey. It’s a piece of the pie I can taste right now. I don’t need to worry about next month or next year, those pieces will come.
So last week I was able to focus on the piece that was Perth. Perth joins Sydney and Melbourne on my list of cities I’d like to visit again. Maybe it’s the ocean, maybe it’s the ferries but Perth, like the other two cities, combines a sophistication with a charm and an ease that I appreciated greatly. I’ve been told it’s because Australia isn’t that old, doesn’t have hundreds and hundreds of years of history like, say, Europe, so the people who live here are able to not take themselves so seriously while at the same time embracing their homeland’s past. I look forward to exploring all three cities in more detail, digging deeper than I was able to on a trip that had a larger agenda.
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| Perth Zoo |
And I finally got pictures of kangaroos and koala bears. Now, true, I had to go to the Perth Zoo to get the pictures. I was too slow with the camera on the train the two or three times I saw kangaroos in the wild, and apparently koalas sleep during the day, which we can all agree is bullshit diva nonsense. The Perth Zoo was nice enough, but having not been to a zoo in over fifteen years, I was reminded that: a)zoos are pretty depressing places and b)it feels weird to be a single dude walking around a zoo by himself. Walking around the Royal Botanical Gardens and Kings Garden felt significantly less strange, and I’m impressed with a nation with such beautiful flowers even in its winter. I went to my first Australian play…and walked out during intermission of my first Australian play. Bad theater is international, apparently. Now, people who know me know I don’t leave plays during intermission, ever, but I decided, as I was watching something truly mediocre, I didn’t want to have to catch a later train out to my host’s home in Fremantle, I wanted to have time to grab a pint and still be home by 11p, and finally I decided, “I can leave, and I’m going to leave.” That piece was over.
My Australian piece of this trip is over at the end of this week, ending up in the northern town of Darwin, where I’m expecting to be able to shed my hoodie and jeans for a good two months. Next week’s piece of the trip is Bali.
I’m looking forward to the next piece of the trip, and adding another piece to divide into 284.
“What time Kalgoorlie?”
Settle down, you cranky, old man. We’ll get there when we get there. It’s progress, and it’s inevitable.
***UPDATE: When we finally arrived in Kalgoorlie, the old man didn’t even get up from his seat and instead sat staring out the window. What the Hell, dude?
